@ed709062 Microsoft Research’s Dryad got productized (search keyword: “LINQ to HPC”) and made it all the way through three beta releases with numerous customers planning to build on top of it; it got killed when some guy in Azure promised that he could make Hadoop work better with a minimal amount of time spent on “optimizing” it. He couldn’t.

Too bad; “write computation DAGs in C# and have the runtime schedule them across large distributed datasets” is an unmatched feature even a decade later. 

 @11ecbe6c I remember hearing something about this, but not the details. In general, there was an absurd about of product fallout due to infighting in the big data space, e.g., the war between (and I'm not sure I'm remembering the names correctly) HDInsight and Azure Data Lake.